I think that the point with the automated house is that neither no one vendor supplies everything, and I mean everything from HVAC thermostats to smart refrigerators to AV receivers, and there's no common standard for interoperability and communication for all types of devices. Those very few fully-automated houses that exist do so because someone spent an inordinate amount of money on all of the tech to connect everything together. Additionally, for a very long time, horizontal cable was required to tie everything together. It's only in the last few years that Wifi has become inexpensive and ubiquitous to the point that it is now integrated into some of the more expensive HVAC thermostats, higher-end refrigerators, and everything else.

It's well possible that with Wifi's spread, the automated house might eventually come into its own. For that to happen though, the public needs to see a value in it, and at the moment all the public sees is the web. If Wireless Access Points get control/management technology embedded for interfacing with and routing data between intelligent appliances then perhaps it will go farther, but at the moment it's not ready yet.

I do some automation work on the side and there is a fairly large market for home and commercial automation already, and it is growing. There are a number of large vendors that do in fact supply everything from HVAC thermostats to AV receivers (as well as lighting, home theaters, touchpanels, etc), though I have never seen a request for a smart refrigerator (granted I haven't been doing this for long). Standards would be nice, but most projects buy their automation equipment from a single vendor (which have

Can the house follow multiple people, lighting up rooms, changing speaker volumes and opening doors all without help? Can it make me breakfast and select clothes from the closet? Can I tell it what to do like with the computer on TNG? What's the order of magnitude for cost for that kind of automation on an 8-room, 2.5 bath house @ ~2200 sq. ft?

What I really want is to be woken up by having a wall in my room simulate a sunrise. Then I want it to bring up the weather forecast and the list of websites I re

They're talking about the sci-fi version, which is basically a specialized AI that has access to all that information.
If you've read The Diamond Age, the Primer is a good example

Even in that vision of the distant future, human intervention was required to make it work completely.

The type of real GOFAI implied by "Computer Teacher" is probably the most valuable tech on the list, but it seems like it's a lot harder to do than the rest. The fact that our best "human simulations" are basically Eliza with a few hard-coded gags is kind of depressing.

One pill that gives you all the nutrition you need and makes you feel completely full and satisfied would be one of the greatest inventions in the history of the world. It could reduce obesity and poor diet related problems in developed nations and feed the rest of the world, freeing them from the slavery of subsistence farming or trying to scrape together enough food.

There are already "smart pills" that analyze certain properties of the body; you'd just need it to analyze and/or interface with existing online monitoring systems and dispense only what you really need.

Copyright's expire? Unlikely. They'll just go before congress once every X years and ask for (and receive) an X year extension. Ever seen the list of all the things that should be out of copyright (based on copyright law at the time they were created)?

Because we're all wired up to pig out - we're the product of millions of years of evolution that says ; "Ooh, calories GOOOD" and "Hey, eat it now, because it might not be here tomorrow."

A "diet" can't override these instincts. My own take on this is to avoid buying foods with an excess of sugar or fat as much as possible - if you don't have it, you can't eat it. Once you've got it, those "don't waste it..." instincts kick in (reinforced by the handed down cultural impact of rationing after WWII).

Considering the calories you actually need the pill would be denser than lead. Since its not lead I suppose you could use some sort of extremely strong microgravitational field to squeeze all of the required elements and configurations into the SIZE of a pill. But at that point using enough mass for that amount of gravity would create a micro blackhole, assuming of course you somehow manipulated the higgs field via whatever causes hypothetical anistropy in the physical laws of the universe to confer more ma

Considering the calories you actually need the pill would be denser than lead. Since its not lead I suppose you could use some sort of extremely strong microgravitational field to squeeze all of the required elements and configurations into the SIZE of a pill.

Sure what a great way to basically destroy the economy. How many people would it put out of work?

No more farmers. No farmers means no feed supply stores so no clerks, stockboys, drivers and cashiers. No farm equipment manufacturers so no salesmen selling the equipment, no factories producing the equipment so no assembly line workers, office staff, managers, and drivers. The collapse of the the manufacturers puts their parts suppliers out of business so no mangers, office staff, drivers, delivery

It would be disastrous, because delicious food, cooking etc. are part of our culture. Furthermore taste is one of our senses. To cut it of by not using it, reduces your life experience. All world food problems are based on bad resource management and bad habits. You do not need to eat meat every day for a healthy diet, you should not eat too much carbohydrates, sugars, and fat. If you do, this has negative effects. We all know it. Those who cannot stop should consider a behavioral therapy or if they eat to

But that's just it though - proper dining would become a true leisure activity, much like the car caused horse riding to become a purely leisure/sport activity. For the rest of the time, you'd pop a pill, and get on with your day.

Whether it really is just a rather smart cleaning tool, reducing the burden on yourself/SO, maybe a bit of cookery to reduce the need for breaks in gaming sessions, or adds a sex function to provide some distraction (again for yourself/SO; threesome?), what other choice is really day-to-day better?

If I had a personal jet pack I'd never be home to make a mess. And who needs a cook when you're getting all that protein from all the bugs that smash into your face and goggles? Also, "I have a jet pack" is a pickup line that probably works more often than not, no matter how few digits your./ uid has.

Yes, dltaylors hypothetical threesome with his significant other and the robot maid was something I found very disturbing - in the "what could possibly go wrong" way first because The Jetsons Rosey was the first robotic maid to pop into my mind when I read it. Then it became disturbing in an "ew that's rather sick" way. Then most disturbing of all was when I wondered how I'd sell the idea to my significant other because unless it was a robot butler rather than a robot maid she just wouldn't go for it and t

Ever since I was a little kid and saw "Back to the Future Part II", I used to dream of the day when I could have my own flying car (be it a DeLorean or not). Of course, as I got older and started actually driving, the idea has become much less appealing. Driving now is, for the most part, a two dimensional activity: you have forward, back, left, right, and all the angles in between. People (apparently) have a hard enough time with that as is. The flying car would just bring stupid into the third dimension.

The third dimension dramatically simplifies many of the things that people have trouble with in 2d:

You no longer need stoplights. Cross traffic is handled by flying at different altitudes.

You no longer have to merge. You just make a sweeping turn as you climb so that you're always going the same direction as other traffic on your flight level. Flying in a helix that way is going to be hard for people to visualize, but in practice it's easy: you're at xxx altitude, therefore fly yyy heading +/- 5 degrees. You won't even have to really manage it yourself: it's a trivial task for the autopilot.

This also eliminates head-on traffic on a two lane road.

The traffic density becomes MUCH lower when you have all that vertical space available - instead of all the cars being confined to linear roads, they're spread out on a stack of infinite-width roads layered 40,000 feet high. Thus when you start approaching someone from behind (it's always from behind since everyone at your level is going the same direction) all you have to do is change headings slightly when you get within a few miles (!).

Those things eliminate the causes of most non-DUI accidents. Of course, flying has its own unique set of difficult problems, but I don't think the "average person doing 3d maneuvers" is significant enough to kill it.

Not that you don't have to worry about the birds with cars, but it's more of a windshield strike problem than a stop the motor problem. You also have to worry about radio and TV towers and power lines just as aircraft and helicopters do. Landing on pedestrians would still be an issue. With flying cars you add a whole new class of hazards even though you eliminate several.

Still, by the time we get true flying cars that are as advanced as we like to think about from science fiction, I suspect that the other a

The non-DUI accidents you're talking about eliminating are the ones where cars are running into eachother. The problem is, even though regulations would be created to try to prevent those things, similar regulations being in place do nothing to prevent cars in 2-d from running into eachother, pedestrians (I've been hit three times, once on the sidewalk, twice in a parking lot while standing still in plain sight, wearing an orange and yellow vest since I worked there), and non-mobile obstacles like trees, b

The simple fact is that we wont have mass market flying cars until we have widely accepted and trusted self-driving cars (which thanks to Google's "its easier to ask forgiveness than permission" mentality may be closer than we realize). Do you really want all those idiots that eat/text/read newspapers/apply makeup/etc while driving to be doing so directly over your house? When you are talking about falling from even low level cruising altitudes, there is no such thing as a minor accident. And not much in the way of survivors...

They'd have to be super light, so that then falling on your house would not do much damage. Who knows, maybe it's possible one day: a cheap plastic frame, a light battery containing very high density energy, and a simple electric motor driving a few propellers.

They'd have to be super light, so that then falling on your house would not do much damage. Who knows, maybe it's possible one day: a cheap plastic frame, a light battery containing very high density energy, and a simple electric motor driving a few propellers.

... assuming we don't come up with a new, novel form of propulsion sometime in the near future.

Nothing says the flying car has to be as fast, heavy, and dangerous as current cars. I think the most ideal flying car would be something like ultra-light aircraft... Your parachute is permanently deployed, so stupid maneuvers or engine failure just results in you floating down to the ground.

My problem with the flying car is that they can no longer be constrained by curbs and other barriers... You'll have them buzzing residential neighborhoo

We have the technology to have mathematically provable free speech and free association. The nation of my birth, the land that I love, my home, enshrined those values in its most important founding documents because it had seen the worst of losing those values. Yet the siren song of simplicity has led the majority to forgo the P2P design of the Internet and end-to-end encryption. Be it symptom or cause, it is an important milestone in the increasing concentration of power.

If those medical shows are to be believed (I know, I know) we have made some rudimentary progress in that regard -- I remember an episode of house where a patient basically had the ability to move what was essentially a "mouse pointer" up and down on a screen.

But we need fusion (or some other non-CO2 emitting virtually endless source of affordable energy.)

The Science Fiction of the 50's and 60's envisioned a world where there was a robot servant in every household. Well we don't have robots that look like C3PO but there is almost a computer in every household, and roombas are becoming popular

But we need fusion (or some other non-CO2 emitting virtually endless source of affordable energy.)

You mean like fission? If all (literally all, including all transport) of the world's energy was from the fission, we would have enough uranium (assuming zero incease in efficiency) for at least 300 years from proven reserves. If you add thorium into the mix, we have enough for several thousand years. And if that's not enough, the Moon is rich in both uranium and thorium.

So, we do already have a vitually unlimited source of carbon-free energy. It's just that evironmentalist pseduo-scientific FUD prevents us from using it.

(Some of the other claims on that page seem a little bit dodgy, but I'd be totally startled for ConEd to claim anything other than the exact truth for the date of founding — that's something they'd be proud of, after all — and New York was the first city to get widespread electric power.) There was experimental stuff before that, but

No we do not need fusion. We need renewable energy sources and a distributed energy production and consumption network. Fusion is just another big technology thing, which is hare to handle and which is horrible expensive. Distributed power production and consumption on the other hand is easy to realize and easy to handle. There is another such distributed technology which work quite well, it is call Internet. Yes there are big server plants in it, but that is not really necessary and even these are distribu

I'm not disappointed by any of these things "not coming to pass". Flying cars and underwater cities will likely be too expensive for most people, but everything else on the list is completely plausible for mass production. Give it time.

With food pills or flying cars, enough people will lose jobs that most working people will be able to employ others to be their maid/butler. The future economy will require this to happen. The minimum wage is the only thing keeping it from happening. With automated shipping, food pills, personal flying possibilities, soaring unemployment will require relatively low minimum wages.

My favourite technology would be solar panels that can power everything. Yes we do have solar panels, but they are a) expensive b) not very efficient. I'm still waiting for solar panels that fit on the back of my laptop and can power it, or solar panels on the top of each car that can power it as long as the sun shines, or solar panels on the roof that can power the whole house.

The sun shines and it's free energy source. It powers all live on earth (well, at least over 95%, some creatures in deep sea are us

Your laptop will typically have a surface area of about 0.1 m2 (unless you have one of those small laptops, then it's far less). That means that even on a hot day in the desert, you have about 100 W available from the sun (1000 W/m2, so 100 W/laptop). Also, that assumes 100% conversion efficiency to electricity. Most laptops exceed 100W in power.

Your car, even if it's a big old American car, will have a surface area of 10 m2 (really large car). That

Eh what, most laptops exceed 100W? What laptops are you speaking of? My Laptop is using 30W under normal usage. The output of the power transformer is not exceeding 60 W (19.5V * 2.5A) of the laptop.

Anyway, it's just the question of power optimization. A 30W laptop can be as powerful as a 200W, only if you make the CPU/GPU power efficient. 5 Years ego I had only computers where the CPU alone used 60W or more. Now you have laptops with 5 hours battery life. It's just a question of priorities and R&D.

As someone who moved several times (including twice internationally) in the last two years, and whose friends reside in at least 4 different continents, I respectfully demand that my taxpayer-funded physicists stop goofing off with God's particles and invent proper Star Trek-like teleportation. C'mon, it's in every SF novel, it can't be that hard.

The iconic idea of flying cars and jetpacks shouldn't happen. It is of a bygone age of suburban sprawl, cheap and plentiful energy, and a disregard for the future of society. We should not and really cannot consider flying cars or jetpacks with any current means of energy generation. Even then, it is really a solution seeking a problems.

What we need is better public transportation, a virtual cottage where telecommuting replaces physical transportation, etc.

I chose 'flying car' in this poll (hey, it's the dream all us techies have) but one thing to consider is a self cleaning house (or condo or apt). There are many automated items such as washer, dishwasher, microwave ovens, timed coffee makers, roombas, and few other examples posted in this thread. My place is an excellent example of entropy, 2nd law of thermodynamics of spontaneous disorganization. I'm constantly having to put energy and time to maintain an ordered system at my home. Some say simply get hire